How to Stop Time

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

…it was good to be back inside the world of feeling.

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

Even though I hadn't seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.

The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.

But then, somehow, it got in.

No. Not got in. That's the wrong way of putting it. Music doesn't get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn't necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.

There was such a yearning and energy to it. I closed my

You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

'Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I'd find it a hard thing to teach. I've always found it hard to talk about music.’

It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.